A sleepy street in the Montreal suburb of Châteauguay was the last place police expected to find the mastermind of the biggest drug-smuggling ring ever to hit northern Quebec.
But that’s exactly where ex-Mountie Michel Leblanc quietly made his headquarters for a thriving business of smuggling hash and cocaine into the Inuit communities of northern Quebec and Nunavut.
When he was arrested in May, Leblanc was making an estimated $1.5 million in profit a year in drug sales. That didn’t include the regular cut he gave his sponsors, the Hells Angels.
Leblanc, 51, a former RCMP undercover narcotics officer, pled guilty to four counts of possession and trafficking of hash and coke, and was sentenced to six years in prison in July.
Michel Leblanc is just the latest ex-cop in Quebec to trip across the thin blue line and wind up being hunted by his former colleagues in uniform.
Crooked ex-cops are emerging as one of Quebec’s fastest-growing and most colourful occupational groups.
Criminologists say their rise reflects a dramatic growth in police corruption across North America fueled by the war on drugs. They say crooked ex-cops are like a mirror held up to corruption inside police stations.
One of the most notorious to hit Quebec is former Montreal police officer Guy Lepage. He was the founding president of the Rockers, a Montreal biker gang personally godfathered by Angels boss Maurice “Mom” Boucher. The Rockers are the frontline shocktroops in the Hells’ six-year war against the Rock Machine biker gang for control of the city’s drug trade. The conflict is the world’s most violent and longest-running biker war.
Convicted of laundering drug profits in 1994, today Lepage is said to be one of Mom Boucher’s most trusted companions, serving as his bodyguard and chauffeur.
Leblanc and Lepage are just two of the 49 ex-cops arrested in Quebec since 1991 on charges ranging from armed robbery, drug trafficking, conjugal violence and sexual abuse of children to murder.
The number of crooked ex-cops is going up, and they are increasingly using their taxpayer-funded training and experience in the service of organized crime.
Between 1991 and 1995, 20 ex-cops were arrested in Quebec. The figure was 29 between 1996 and 2000, an increase of almost 50 percent.
Four ex-cops faced organized-crime-related charges in the first half of the ’90s. The number was seven in the second half of the decade, an increase of 75 percent.
Police say ex-cops can be a big help to organized crime groups, with their knowledge of police techniques, identities of undercover officers and informants, and their police contacts.
The case of Michel Leblanc, head of the northern Quebec drug ring, shows how much trouble dirty ex-cops can be.
SQ Cpl. Alain De Bonville, the investigator who collared Leblanc, said the ex-Mountie “was very, very careful in his way of doing business.” Many of his dealers up north never saw him in per son and didn’t even know his name. Some simply knew him as “Mike.”
Police arrested 50 lower-level members of Leblanc’s drug ring in 1998 and 1999, but the hash and coke kept flooding north. None of those arrested identified the man in charge, and police still didn’t know they were hunting an ex-Mountie.
The big break for police came when they stumbled on Leblanc’s Châteauguay address written on a package during one of the arrests. By May, when he was finally nabbed, Leblanc’s monthly profit had soared to an estimated $300,000.
Mark Murphy, a retired 25-year RCMP organized-crime investigator, said a dirty ex-cop has a big advantage over run-of-the-mill criminals.
“He would be able to pick out surveillance vehicles very easily. He might even have ways of checking out who’s working on whom. The connections would still be there. It would be a little bit scary. I would not want to see that in any shape or form,” said Murphy, who was the RCMP handler of Cecil Kirby, one of Canada’s most important biker informants.
“It’s always very preoccupying,” agreed MUC police Commander François Bingras, head of the province’s police biker task force. “We have to take measures to counter it. It is a problem.”
The rise in dirty ex-cops in Quebec mirrors an explosion in police corruption south of the border caused by the war on drugs. A 1998 FBI-led study found that the number of known U.S. law enforcement officers in prison increased fivefold in four years, from 107 in 1994 to 548 in 1998.
Joseph McNamara, a former police chief in San José, Texas, calls policing of drug trafficking “impossible.”
“The sheer hopelessness of the task has led many officers to rationalize their own corruption,” he wrote in a recent article.
As police salaries go up, cops are less willing to take a risk on petty corruption, like accepting a bribe to drop a traffic ticket. Instead, they are now attracted to the vast pools of money in the drug trade, said Frédéric Lemieux, a University of Montreal doctoral student in criminology.
In a study, Lemieux found seven of 12 recent police corruption cases in Quebec involved cops pocketing over $50,000, with one case involving $2.8 million.
“More and more, the petty corruption has stopped or slowed. We’re increasingly seeing a ferocious corruption,” he said.
